European and Indian languages seem to be related in the very distant past. Linguists are able, for example, to trace similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek. And they’ve come up with the expression ‘proto-Indo-European’–often written as the initialism PIE – to mean: ‘The unrecorded, hypothetically reconstructed language from which Indo-European languages are believed to have derived.’ In other words, the experts don’t really know what this ancient language was, but they can trace its influence as a source behind Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages (including Old English) as well as Sanskrit and Persian – for which we do have evidence. Whatever this very early language of the human race was like, it must have spread very widely. How did that happen? The Nazis believed it was the ‘Aryan’ race that spread PIE because it was ‘superior’ to other races. Clearly nonsense. The modern ‘decolonisation’ movement is just as ideologically blinkered, claiming it’s because white people are always violent and drove everyone else out. Both those ideas are racist (and, therefore, completely nuts). And now we have some evidence of what really happened. A newly published study of early DNA suggests that speakers of early European languages often lived (peacefully) beside people whose languages they replaced (probably by teaching them to speak PIE). The proto-Indo-European language spread across large parts of the world in the centuries after about 4000 BC. Nearly all European language groups – Celtic, Germanic, Latin and Slavic – are Indo-European sharing common roots. So are Persian and Kurdish and some of the main Indian languages that descended from Sanskrit. Even more astonishing, experts have deciphered ancient Indo-European script from archaeological sites in modern China. So, whatever ‘proto-Indo-European’ was like – it can’t be explained by nutty racist theories!

Britain’s Observer newspaper once published a list of newish jargon (or slang) words used to describe different types of television programming. My favourite, I think, would be the word ‘irritainment’. Based on previous spins on the word ‘entertainment’ such as ‘infotainment’, this one refers to TV programs that are as annoying as ants at a picnic, but which folk still find compulsively watchable. Many people would put Big Brother, the various ‘Idol’ programs and most of their spin-offs (including all those competitive cooking shows) in this category of being ‘irritainment.’ It’s baffling, but, somehow, if something is sufficiently annoying or irritating it can attract viewers – and even sales. Some TV commercials seem to base their sales pitch on being so irritating that you’ll run out of the room screaming – the idea (seemingly) is that you’ll run all the way to the shops and buy the product. Well, what works for the ads works for the programs. Hence this new name for an overly familiar category of television programming: ‘irritainment.’